Behind the Scenes of Issue 97

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial

Behind the Scenes of Issue 97

Shop anniversaries, Kemove K68 in the mailbox, 10% ALLPCB discount, updates on donations (38%), vendors, meetups, developments.

dovenyi
Published September 30, 2022

Creators! Feel free to tip me off about your keyboard related projects to bring them to 100K readers.

It seems I messed up Newsletter #98 and a link from the mail points to here. Click this link to get to #98.

Hey y'all,

Welcome back for another edition of Keyboard Builders' Digest (this time Issue #97), a weekly roundup of this DIY keyboard focused newsletter and blog from Tamas Dovenyi – that's me. If you are new to this, you can read how this started out and what this is all about nowadays. If you like what you see, you can subscribe to the newsletter (free) and donate some bucks to keep this otherwise free and ad-free project alive.

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Quick news

Talpkeyboards turned 5. Wow!
and ergohaven turned 1, just like Himo MK.

Btw, keyboard shop entries are highlighted on cake days, and I made a quick and dirty interface for myself to keep track of that.

Kemove K68

Hm. Kemove's Dora sent me one of their keyboards, a K68. Thanks!

While I mostly use columnar splits with thumb clusters, for the past few weeks I partially returned to more convenient layouts – both physical and logical ones because of a banal reason: I managed to kill two of my monoblock splits at about the same time. :D

Nothing serious I couldn't fix, but I haven't had time for resoldering some joints so I simply grabbed one of my wife's cheap rubberdome boards at hand (blasphemy!).

Pic:

That's why this K68 couldn't arrive at a better time: During these past weeks, after almost four years, I managed to relearn QWERTY (better said QWERTZ) and, at least for now, I'm fairly familiar with the classic staggering again.

I'll try to post some shots and also write a review on the K68 later, but if you can't wait and are genuinely interested in buying this keyboard (or the DK61), Kemove offered you a 20% discount (this is unprecedented I guess) – just use the KBDNEWS coupon code.

New ALLPCB discount

The discount at ALLPCB has been raised to $10 for kbd.news readers! (One use per customer.)

There has been a $5 discount in effect for some time, but after some correspondence the nice people at ALLPCB accepted to raise that to $10.

I haven't checked it yet, but this way their prices are quite competitive even with the cheapest offers I guess.

As with other PCB manufacturers, ALLPCB is not yet prepared to handle these coupon codes as straightforwardly as e.g. keyboard shops do it.

To get the coupon, you have to register via this link and you should get the coupon automatically (which expires in 60 days).

If you can't see your coupon in 24 hours, just contact their online support to claim it.

I hope you'll find this useful, and in case this cooperation works well, I was told there will be more goodies for you available: e.g. free shipping coupons or free sample coupons.

Please get back to me with feedback if and how this works out.

Vendor database

mecha.store added.
Weird Little Keebs added, and Ewen offered you a 10% discount (code: KBDNEWS)

Meetup database

Mechanicon 2023 added (Frankfurt, Germany).

As always, this meetup database is both a calendar and an archive so feel free to send me upcoming events or even ones from the recent past to make this collection as comprehensive as possible.

Donors

No new donors this week. Except of course the recurring donations of my long-time supporters. Thanks!

September is practically over, and my donation meter stands at 38% of my longtime goal (or 75% of my short-term target).

If you'd like and can afford to help, here is the donation form.

Small developments

Thanks to Talpkeyboards, I identified a small bug in the script highlighting shops on their cake day. This should be fixed now.
As I've mentioned above, shop entries are highlighted on cake days, and I made a simple interface for myself to keep track of that. However, the exact founding date is only known in 96 cases (of all the 400+ shops).

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That's all for today. Thanks for reading.

Feel free to comment in this issue's r/mk thread, and as always: keep learning and building.

Cheers, Tamás

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Published on Fri 30th Sep 2022. Featured in KBD #97.

Keyboard Builders' Digest / Editorial